If indeed all that's going on the RAID5 are your Exchange databases, might as well kick up your block size to as large as your RAID controller can match.
That makes it both space and read/write efficient. If you were going to be putting more and smaller files on that disk, I'd push for smaller block size, but give the nature of the few files you're putting there, that is going to be your best bet. Kurt On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 04:10, Dave Vantine <[email protected]> wrote: > I am getting ready to install a new IBM X3650 server to migrate Exch 2003 to > 2010. I have a couple of questions that I have been trying to resolve but > find no clear answers with Google and am hoping some of the Exchange Guru's > on the list can provide some guidence. > > The server will have a pair of Raid 1 disks for the log files and I want to > build a 5 disk Raid 5 set for the database. Win2k8 R2 will format the > cluster size to 4K by default. My first question is there a better cluster > size to optimize the disk space with Exchange. > > The second question is a dual question relating to the LSI MegaRaid 5014 > controller that was installed. When you configure this raid set it allows > you to select a STRIP size (not Stripe). It is not clear from the > controllers documentation what this acutally mean but in some of the google > searches it seems to suggest that the strip is that portion of the strip > that exists on each individual drive. As there is no stripe size > configuration entry I can only assume that it builds the the RAID stripe > size by combining the STRIP size on each drive to arrive at a stripe. The > default strip size is 128K so it would look like my Stripe size would end up > being 128K x 5 = 640K. > > I assume that having the Stipe size on the array correlate with the NTFS > cluster size would provide some performance optimizations though I could be > wrong on this and there is no correlation. I am hoping there are some > hardware/raid experts on the list who might be able to confirm my assumption > and if so, is there a formulae to determine the optimum stripe size to a > given NTFS cluster size > > -- > Thanks > Dave Vantine > > --- > To manage subscriptions click here: > http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ > or send an email to [email protected] > with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist
